Ah, that time of year again. When the snow blankets the yards, the kids get snow-days, and the daytime high never breaks 30 degrees.

Oh wait, I live in the Bay Area. It’s just cold and wet. No snow (unless you drive east a couple hours), just bad traffic. Yes, the ability for a Californian to drive is water soluable.

We’ve completed our office move, so my commute is 20 minutes shorter in the morning, and yet remains the same 45 minute commute coming home. Stupid Oracle. I had an office for like the past 9 years, so moving back to a cube was a shock… to the amount of stuff I had accumulated over the years. My cube is full of games, toys, and statues. To paraphrase a great movie: “It looks like a really rich four year-old works here.”

I am looking forward to Christmas, even though my five year-old son asked for a toy made for eighteen month-olds. It was the ONLY thing he asked Santa for when he was on his lap, and he asked for it in GREAT DETAIL, explaining to the jolly fat man exactly what every part did and how awesome it would be to get. My wife and I are understandng and have plenty of other presents that are more age appropriate for him, but we got him the kiddie toy anyway. Can’t shatter the illusion just yet.

After Christmas I have a Warhammer 40,000: Apocalype game scheduled with a few guys from my old office. My Tau army has been bolstered by another Crisis suit and a Tigershark AX-1-0. I can’t wait to unload a 10″ template on my enemies next week.

One of the cool things the company did was put a bunch of swag up for auction for the Child’s Play charity. When I last checked we had one item bidding over $700. Holy crap! I think that next year we are going to have some awesome stuff for the charity auction, because giving to those in need really does make you feel more like a human being. It proves that we are capable of thinking of more than just ourselves. In the “me me me” world we live in, I get a warm feeling in my heart when I see things like Child’s Play succeed.

I haven’t posted in a while, so I might as well diatribe a bit.

• I’ve had some stuff going on with Andre and his school that’s been weighing on my mind.
• I’ve found that most of my normal escape mechanisms to get away from the toils of the day are no longer appealing.

That said there are some bright points:

• My wife and I have a new methodology on doing the dishes that has kept the sink (mostly) clean for over a month now.
• 4th Edition of Dungeons and Dragons was announced. This was pretty huge, as I really got into the info-drip that was the 2nd Ed to 3rd Ed change over. Now I get to relive the info drip all over again, only now I am older and more mature (yeah, right).
• Bioshock is cool. I played a bunch, but am still nowhere near the end. Everyone I know is finished or finishing. I will probably finish around December.
• Stranglehold is coming out today. I got the “now shipped” email from EBGames.com, so I have that to look forward to this weekend.
• Oh, and if you didn’t know the Xbox 360 kicks ass solely for the fact that they have Gamerpoints. I should write a blog entry about “validating my time”.

When I set up my new TiVo I went through and started grabbing season passes on a bunch of stuff that I always wanted to watch, but never followed through with. One of those was Mythbusters. This is a show that I would always watch if it was on, but I never really tivo’ed before.

Now I get a couple episodes every day. Stuff I have never seen before either, so it’s like a mini Mythbusters marathon every day when I get home from work. I eat dinner to Mythbusters, and my wife (and now my son) are fans of the show as well.

My son loves the show. He doesn’t get the “science” of the show, he’s only four. He likes when they blow stuff up, or when they shoot stuff. He -loves- Buster, the crash test dummy that they use in their experiments. When I asked him who Buster was, he replied “He’s the guy the Mythbusters are always trying to kill.”

A bit of a backgrounder for those who don’t know me… I am a huge Star Wars fan, and have been ever since I saw the original movie back in 1977 at the Old Mill theater in Mountain View.

When I was blessed with a son, I knew that I had to introduce the movies to him “right”, so that he got a similar experience to what I went through. So I had to figure out the problems. First, there were 5, and soon to be all 6, movies already out and in the public conciousness. There were toys and figures, and even my room displayed stuff from all the movies. I had to compartmentalize Andre’s knowledge of future events. First off, under no circumstances could he learn that Darth Vader was Luke’s daddy until the “big reveal” in Empire. Second, he couldn’t learn that Leia and Luke were siblings until that comes to light in Jedi. The big reveals in Episodes 1 to 3 weren’t all that big, so I cared less about isolating him from that.

When he turned three he proved that he had a knowledge of what he was seeing and could process stories, and remember key elements from them. I knew that if I was to succeed in my mission, I had to take this opportunity to introduce him to the original Star Wars (Episode IV: A New Hope). I found out later that this was a brilliant move on my part, which I will explain at the end.

So Andre watched Star Wars. Since he was only 3, I didn’t want to overload him with too much story at once, so he ONLY got to watch Episode IV… for an entire year. To him that was all there was, just like 1977 and my experience. Sure he had toys and stuff of things he didn’t see in the movie, but even to this day we get toys of stuff that wasn’t in any of the movies. It was a long year, and I lost count how many times he watched Star Wars, but in the end… he got it… he knew all the things he needed to: Darth Vader was once a pupil of Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Darth Vader killed Luke’s daddy. Mission accomplished, even though it drove my wife crazy, as Andre would ask question after question about the movie and the characters, and she knew she could only give him part of the truth.

Fast forward to his fourth birthday. He waited a full year to see the next movie (heck, I had to wait 3!) and he was going to be entering pre-school very soon, so my time was pressed. You see, once he was in a social environment with other kids (and teachers) I couldn’t control the flow of information. Anyone could say “hey kid, Darth Vader is Luke’s father” and the magic would be lost. So I showed him The Empire Strikes Back. It took two sittings to get through the whole thing (but he loves the Walkers!) but he finally got the big reveal while sitting in my wife’s lap, and hearing Darth Vader claim his paternity to Luke.

It was a lot for his little mind to process. We quizzed him about it immediately, asking him what did Darth Vader just say, and his answer was a long pause and “I don’t know”… he had the air of disbelief in his words. He heard them, but he couldn’t believe them. Very soon he realized that Darth Vader was Luke’s dad, and that Obi-Wan had been lieing to him, and us, for a year through repeated viewings of Star Wars.

It was magic. I shattered his world.

With that out of the way, it was only a matter of weeks before he saw Return of the Jedi and learned of the relationship of Leia and Luke, and I even showed him Episode I so he could get a taste for those films (and to test if he would fall in love with Jar Jar… he didn’t, he’s a Jawa fan through and through). Star Wars are still his favorite films.

I held off showing Episode II and Episode III for a while, since I wasn’t sure he could grok the Stormtroopers suddenly being “good guys” in Episode II, and Episode III is just too darn dark. Last weekend I showed him Episode II, and he while watching it he had questions like “Why doesn’t Jango Fett want Obi-Wan to hit him with his lightsaber?”

I answered truthfully, “He probably doesn’t want his head cut off”.

And when the Jedi showed up in the arena at the end… I finally got to see a payoff of what George was thinking… Andre’s comments were “The Jedi showed up! They are going to rescue them!” and “Wow! Look at all those lightsabers!”

Of course my favorite was when Mace Windu beheaded Jango Fett his comment was perfect: “He’s dead!”

Now to get back to how lucky I got to accomplish all of this… a co-worker at my job has a four year old son who was turning five soon. He went to “introduce” him to Star Wars by showing him Episode IV just like I had. When Darth Vader came on the screen in the beginning, he told his son “That’s Darth Vader! He’s a bad guy.”

His son retorted with “You mean that’s Luke’s father?” It turns out that his schoolmates all knew the story from all 6 movies and they played Star Wars all the time at school. The movies had no surprises for his son… when Leia showed up he blurted out that it was Luke’s sister… everything. I count myself blessed that I accomplished the goal of giving my son a Star Wars experience similar to my own.

My son Andre, was playing with his cars one day and he pulled one up to the toy gas station he had…

“Mommy? Where is the gas-hole on this car?” he asked.

“WHAT?!” she said, mishearing him.

“The gas-hole, the hole where you put the gas.” he replied logically.

We cracked up for a while after that one… out of the mouths of babes…

My son Andre is four years old. His favorite food is pizza. He likes pepperoni and sausage the best. On Monday we had Round Table with the grandparents, giving him his pizza fix. On Tuesday, my wife and him had dinner themselves (I was working late) and she made home-made pizza.

On Wednesday, we couldn’t figure out what to have for dinner, so I asked Andre:

“What do you want for dinner?”, I asked.

“Pizza?” he replied.

“Dude, what did you have yesterday with Mommy?” came my response.

“Um, pizza.” he sheepishly answered.

“And what did you have the day before with Grandma and Grandpa?” I asked.

“Um, Round Table Pizza.” he conceited. A few seconds later he piped up, “Um, we could have NORTH BEACH pizza tonight instead!” He thought he was a genius for coming up with that alternative.